SpaceX Hyperloop Pod Competition

http://www.spacex.com/hyperloop/

by dtparr • 11 years ago

244 123 11 years ago

loceng• 11 years ago

I'm really happy to see Tesla and SpaceX being run properly as platforms. Clearly Elon Musk has a great understanding of platforms with his online involvement with PayPal, however there aren't as obvious examples of it occurring in the physical product world; there are attempts though they seem more to control a user's behaviour and entrench people into a recurring business model than actually disrupting an unmanaged-disorganized system.

Platforms that generate a lot of value from APIs succeed by getting developer adoption by running things like hackathons - and this effort seems no different. Kudos.

dtparr3• 11 years ago

I thought this was an interesting tidbit from the linked rules pdf:

In addition to hosting the competition, SpaceX will likely build a pod for demonstration purposes only. This team will not be eligible to win.

toomuchtodo10• 11 years ago

I think that's admirable, and doesn't strike me as out of the ordinary for Elon. SpaceX has some remarkable engineering talent (which also transfers tech to Tesla; see their friction stir welding technique that is used by both companies now).

It wouldn't be fair for SpaceX to be able to win.

dtparr3• 11 years ago

I agree SpaceX recusing itself from winning its own competition is the right thing, but the bit I found interesting was just that they were building a pod as well as the track, putting even more skin in the metaphorical game.

I've had projects before where I came up with an interesting idea but dismissed it as too costly (in time or money or what have you), but it stuck in my head. So then, well maybe I'll just do a quick proof of concept... And then, well, maybe I can hack something a bit more complete together. Eventually, despite myself, it makes it to being a fully formed thing just because it was so interesting I couldn't ignore it.

I'm wondering if the Hyperloop is going to be that sort of thing for Elon et al.

grkvlt• 11 years ago

Serious observation.

Why do people (here) feel they can refer to Elon Musk as just 'Elon' - using his first name, that is? It seems overly familiar, and impolite to me. Being from the UK, I would refer to him as 'Musk' in both writing and speech, and perhaps even as 'Mr. Musk' in formal writing. Is it a SV, or even just American, thing perhaps? It seems to depend on the person, though.

For instance, the Google founders are often referred to as 'Larry and Sergey' rather than 'Page and Brin' here, although 'Eric' was rarely used, his full name seeming to be preferred instead. Similarly, nobody would talk about 'Tim' from Apple, rather 'Cook' or 'Tim Cook', although the nickname 'Jony' is often used instead of 'Ive' or 'Jonathan Ive', and 'Jobs' more often than 'Steve' although that coulkd have been due to the possible confusion over the two founders.

In general, it seems that certain engineering icons and luminaries are granted this informal status. In a similar way to actual rock stars, perhaps because the referers feel the informality gives a sense of familiarity that brings them closer to their idols?

MattGrommes• 11 years ago

I would imagine there are a bunch of nerds at SpaceX who would be might annoyed if they weren't allowed to participate in building something like this. Very cool of the company to make it an official thing, and to realize the issues with having their people win.

robin_reala• 11 years ago

Site was erroring when I visited; Google cache is here: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:www.sp...

moey• 11 years ago

"Neither SpaceX nor Elon Musk is affiliated with any Hyperloop companies. While we are not developing a commercial Hyperloop ourselves, we are interested in helping to accelerate development of a functional Hyperloop prototype."

I thought Elon wanted to create the Hyperloop. Here I was thinking I would see it in the next 5-10 years :(

dtparr3• 11 years ago

I think he wants it to be created by someone, but my recollection is that when he announced the plans he specifically said he didn't have time to do it himself and wanted others to take the ball and run with it.

zacharypinter• 11 years ago

Very cool announcement.

It strikes me that this is a pretty good insurance policy against a poor implementation of Hyperloop being used as an argument against its feasibility. SpaceX/Musk gets to put out a proof of concept track and pod without committing to building the full thing themselves.

databound• 11 years ago

It's funny they are building a 1 mile test track but don't have any interest in running with the idea... seems pretty committed at this point.

fitzwatermellow• 11 years ago

They plan on releasing the full requirements for the final design in Aug, but the rules document includes some example technical questions. Most calculations I imagine can be estimated using college physics and mechanics: drag coefficient, pneumatic pressure, heat flux, etc. But I'm curious if anyone has any references specific to air compresser propulsion systems? I'm thinking it would make a nice WebGL simulation that shows the relationship between speed and heat generated ;)

lisper2• 11 years ago

SpaceX will construct a one-mile test track adjacent to our Hawthorne, California headquarters

I'm not sure which would be the more remarkable achievement, getting the Hyperloop working, or obtaining the real estate to build a mile-long test track in Hawthorne.

smackfu• 11 years ago

They are right next to Hawthorne Airport... that's the only place I can see the track being located. The rest of the surroundings are industrial buildings.

odonnellryan• 11 years ago

Aren't these meant to be underground?

TeMPOraL4• 11 years ago

They could use what I will call a rocket-estate crash coupling:

1. "Accidentally" crash a rocket near some properties there (far enough not to do any actual damage).

2. Wait for said property prices to crash.

impish19• 11 years ago

You can't be serious.

socceroos2• 11 years ago

rocketing towards affordability. I like it.

myth_buster3• 11 years ago

Well the design review is happening at Texas A&M. I'm sure they could have done the test track here easily.

bhauer• 11 years ago

I live in Hawthorne. Residential real-estate is fairly expensive in some areas (western side, where ~1200sqft goes for ~$700K), but commercial real estate is still not that expensive. Plus, Hawthorne is very diverse and Spacex is located on the less expensive east side of the city.

Nearby El Segundo is quite a different story, which I assume is part of the reason SpaceX moved from El Segundo to Hawthorne.

I also expect that they will run the test track around their current airport campus. I'm not even sure if they need to buy all that much new property to do so. They may just need to cut a deal with (or buy) the airport.

The cool thing is that this test track should be visible from the 105 freeway (along with the massive Tesla logo). So even people not familiar with the project will be enticed to find out more!

As a Hawthorne resident, I am excited!

mixmastamyk4• 11 years ago

Why not over the parking lots or back alleys, etc?

lisper2• 11 years ago

Cost. A full-scale hyperloop needs to be on pylons, but a 1-mile test track can be built directly on the ground, which would be a lot cheaper. Why pay for pylons if you don't have to?

myth_buster3• 11 years ago

For those who couldn't access the site:

  Webpage screen grab [0]
  Guidelines [1]

[0] http://i.imgur.com/iq3W18x.png

[1] https://drive.google.com/file/d/18IkkbuxMbrzaVKHRnqXqtWimxF5...

marbogast40• 11 years ago

Wait But Why - Tim Urban's take: http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/06/hyperloop.html

camenk• 11 years ago

Thanks for the article. I'm really hopeful that this competition will bring out something on the table (maybe a prototype).

It would be really nice to be able to travel between nearby cities in the US without spending hours driving / flying. Flying itself is not really bad if it's not because of the time you need to waste until you actually fly.

ljk• 11 years ago

Neither SpaceX nor Elon Musk is affiliated with any Hyperloop companies

what does that mean? Didn't they come up with the idea of hyperloop?

lnanek2• 11 years ago

Elon has flat out said he is too busy with Tesla and SpaceX to do yet another company.

GeneralMayhem• 11 years ago

For things like this, "affiliated" usually has a very precise legal definition, which means that they don't help each other with research and they're not financially invested. It means they're not cheating by entering their friends (or themselves) in the competition. Compare with the small print on most lotteries and contests, e.g. Google Code Jam:

You cannot participate in the Contest if... you are a current employee (including intern), contractor, officer, or director, of Google or its affiliates.

omegant• 11 years ago

The 9 engineering points at the end of the text, are very important and extremely dificult each one of them.

I would add a pod decompression, and the emergency braking emergencies. Common oxigen masks don't work above 50000' and you can not dissipate the kinetic energy of a pod traveling at 900km/h just by friction without a brake fire.

MertsA• 11 years ago

you can not dissipate the kinetic energy of a pod traveling at 900km/h just by friction without a brake fire.

Sure you can, just use water stored onboard to cool the brakes. Obviously the only case when you would need to use friction brakes in the hyperloop is in an emergency so we're fine with just boiling away the water into the steel tube. It takes 2,261 KJ per kg to boil water in the vacuum of the tube and assuming a pod weighs in at 1000 kg and is travelling 300 m/s that gives us 45 MJ of kinetic energy to deal with. That comes out to just under 20 kg of water to stop a 1000 kg pod moving 300 m/s. That's a decent size tank when considering the form factor of a hyperloop pod but still doable.

mixmastamyk4• 11 years ago

If it works well, I'd like to see these in LA or other big cities too, not just long distance. Would be great to get on one of these and end up at the beach in Santa Monica at high speed instead of suffering through traffic.

netfire2• 11 years ago

Would a Hyperloop system work well in a system with frequent stops, where you wouldn't be able to get up to full-speed because you needed to stop and the stops could disrupt other express traffic. Would you really be gaining that much over other traditional rail transportation options?

It seems like the strength of the Hyperloop is extremely fast travel over long distances. Personally, I think having a line between Las Vegas and Los Angeles would be awesome, as the traffic can be horrible on that route, especially on weekends and probably significantly affects traffic in LA in general. Its also around 100 miles less than the LA to SF route, through mostly undeveloped desert, so it could be a lot cheaper to build.

mixmastamyk4• 11 years ago

I think it would, however I didn't realize until now how small the tubes and cars are, might make a metro-type system challenging. Or, it could be widened for metro usage, like the disneyland monorail.

stcredzero3• 11 years ago

Would a Hyperloop system work well in a system with frequent stops, where you wouldn't be able to get up to full-speed because you needed to stop and the stops could disrupt other express traffic.

No, which is why it's strictly city-to-city. It's supposed to compete with short haul point to point airlines. Those don't have neighborhood stops either.

thechao• 11 years ago

Texas triangle:

    San Antonio <-> Austin <-> Dallas
    Houston <-> Dallas
    House <-> San Antonio

That'd link up 14—17 million people. Expected growth is another 10 million over the next 20 years.

At an average speed of 600mph, it'd be about 25m commute between points, worst case.

imglorp2• 11 years ago

I wonder what they will do about claustrophobia?

The capsule itself would need to be small—4.43ft (1.35m) wide and only 3.61ft (1.10m) high. No standing room

No windows, pod inside a metal tube, seats reclined with minimal head room. There's no rational reason to panic in that position, but many people will not be comfortable. Video displays might help, but only to a point.

cloudwalking• 11 years ago

VR goggles.

unoti• 11 years ago

I was about to say that sounds even more vomit-inducing, when you consider all the g-forces going on, and then add goggles on top of it. But then, if the g-forces match what the passenger is seeing through the goggles, that could actually be less vomit-inducing maybe? It's an interesting idea. I personally find the idea of spending an hour in a tiny enclosed space with no ability to move to be quite disturbing, and I'm not sure if the idea of doing it with VR goggles makes that less disturbing or more.

Andrenid• 11 years ago

VR goggles displaying a view of outside, maybe recorded from a plane that flew the same path then synced to your location to simulate your actual trip.

The feeling to your body would then match the view too.

capkutay2• 11 years ago

Innovation like this requires some getting used to from consumers. I'm sure people thought fear of heights would be a problem for commercial airlines when they started up. Early adopters have to be fearless and then it will become mainstream once everyone perceives it as safe and normal.

hughes• 11 years ago

At 600MPH, I'm not sure I'd want to see the ground speeding past a few feet below...

stcredzero3• 11 years ago

"Commuter Luge"

mrfusion• 11 years ago

I've been worried about the same thing. Also the idea that if the pod stops you have no way out for hundreds of miles.

socceroos2• 11 years ago

I'm pretty sure the plan would include service access every few KM.

thrill2• 11 years ago

Pod proposals (more like musings at this point) I've read include sufficient self contained locomotion ability to move slowly between egress points.

icc97• 11 years ago

This is actually fairly close to the Eurotunnel between England and France. There are windows in the trains but they are very small and entirely useless for the 30 minutes whilst you're inside the tunnel. In the Eurotunnel you have to remain in your car - i.e. no standing.

guynamedloren• 11 years ago

Any engineers or mechanically inclined folks around LA interested in assembling a team? Let's chat.

About me: full stack software engineer with a degree in Systems Engineering from University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. I work on classic cars and build shit with my hands when I'm not coding. I'm into efficiency, and I loooove the idea of building a better, faster cheaper CA high-speed railway.

nether• 11 years ago

I'm an aeromechanical engineer around LA and might be interested in contributing some design/analysis work in a non-leadership role. Current work is in structural analysis, interested in aerodynamics though (was my master's concentration years ago).

harperlee• 11 years ago

So now I'm very curious: can anyone comment on what's the biggest collaboration of this sort to have come out of Hacker News?

newbook• 11 years ago

I'm a Toronto-based Mechanical Design Engineer with an Electrical Engineering education, I've worked in Toronto and Mountain View.

I've designed airborne laser LIDAR scanning systems and large-scale lighting solutions. I've also done a lot of work with stress and heat management, mass electronics production and packaging.

I'd be interested in taking up a project like this and seeing how far we could go with it!

If you're interested, shoot me a message: vpsanta@gmail.com.

michaelbarton2• 11 years ago

This immediately reminded me of the early days of steam when, very similarly, at Rainhill a one mile test track of railway was constructed and people were invited to compete their different locomotives. The winner was Stevenson's rocket which amazed the large crowd by travelling at a heady top speed of 30mph.

An "also ran" was the amusing cycloped, the only non-steam entry, a horse on top of a treadmill walking the carriage forward.

abc_lisper3• 11 years ago

Hoping you were not old enough to know this first hand ;)

This is fascinating? Where did you come across this info?

melloc• 11 years ago

There's a Wikipedia article on this, it seems:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainhill_Trials

michaelbarton2• 11 years ago

There's an excellent book on the start of the railways "Fire and Steam: A New History of the Railways in Britain". It's very interesting and full of side stories about how people adapted to the start of the steam age.

For example the one of the first railway lines was more like a toll road. A company built the tracks, and then other companies paid to run their locomotives on them. This lead to chaos where two locomotives would meet on the single track, neither was willing to back up, and so the passengers would often get out and fight each other over it.

dimlyaware• 11 years ago

That fact really made me laugh when I looked into it. Thank you for the cycloped fact.

CodeSheikh• 11 years ago

"Neither SpaceX nor Elon Musk is affiliated with any Hyperloop companies" Yet it is hosted on spacex.com. I love the project but I hate the legalities here. What does that mean? If something bad happens during operation then these aforementioned entities cant be held responsible.

vidarh• 11 years ago

It means what it says. Various people have formed companies to try to commercialise the Hyperloop concept. SpaceX and Elon Musk are not affiliated with them.

SpaceX and Elon Musk are behind this competition.

jackreichert• 11 years ago

I'm finding the center alignment of the text bothersome.

Aside from that, very cool!

martinald2• 11 years ago

The projections of capacity seem way too low. It says it can do 840passengers/hour.

In the UK each 11 car train on the West Coast Mainline can take about 600 passengers seated + maybe slightly over 100 more standing. So around 700. We have 3 trains per hour between London and Birmingham, which adds up to a rough capacity of 2200 per hour.

This doesn't even take into account the multitude of slower trains that go between the two cities.

All these trains are generally congested as hell at peak (and increasingly off peak).

How is 840 passengers/hour enough for two big cities? I would assume making each pod bigger and heavier would require a greater stopping distance between them so the only way I can see to add more capacity is to build parallel hyperloops. At that point you've got the land take and the expense that comes with it.

DuskStar• 11 years ago

To be fair, Birmingham <-> London is 125 miles, while Los Angeles <-> San Francisco is 380 miles. A better comparison would be Edinburgh <-> London, at 410 miles or so. At those distances, required capacity probably drops off.

martinald2• 11 years ago

Well, there's between one and two trains per hour between London and Edinburgh, each holding about 600 people. So that's more just on train capacity, and there's up to 53 flights a day between London and Edinburgh. So that's another 6000ish seats per day.

Just doesn't add up.

frankus• 11 years ago

I had the same thought. The waitbutwhy article cites 840 per hour being slightly less than the current traffic for that city pair, but that's assuming quite non-peaky traffic (7+ million if run 24/7).

It's also assuming that the demand at a cost of $20 and 35 minutes will be roughly the same as it is now.

Gustomaximus2• 11 years ago

Rather than 2 parallel hyperloops would it be more efficient to make passing points? Orgainse timings so pods pull off at a platform and then car traveling in the opposite direction or overtaking can go past.

peterbraden• 11 years ago

but that would prevent using the pressure in the loop?

revelation• 11 years ago

It seems like theres way too little information here to build anything.

Animats• 11 years ago

The original Hyperloop system was supposed to be powered by linear induction motors spaced along the track. The pod doesn't have propulsion capability, except maybe an emergency system. So the pod/track interface is pretty much set by the propulsion system.

For trains, linear induction motors have usually been paired with magnetic levitation, as in the Transrapid system. But they don't have to be. Many roller coasters with a linear induction motor launch system have been built; Flight of Fear at King's Dominion, by Premiere Rides, was the first, in 1996. For a 1-mile test track, outsourcing the whole job to Premiere Rides or Intamin would be a good move. Intamin, which mostly makes amusement park rides, also has a transportation division. They build monorail systems. Intamin would just have to combine the car design from their P8 monorail[1] with their linear induction motor launch system.[2] By Intamin standards, a fast 1 mile loop with no hills is easy. ("We can put in a vertical loop for a small extra charge...")

[1] http://www.intaminworldwide.com/transportation/Home/news/Sha... [2] http://www.intaminworldwide.com/amusement/RollerCoasters/LSM...

tallerholler• 11 years ago

as an aside, holy crap that website is terrible!

jcchin41• 11 years ago

For those interested in getting a better handle on the vehicle thermodynamics, see[1]. Feel free to play around with the open-source python model here[2]

[1] https://mdao.grc.nasa.gov/publications/AIAA-2015-1587.pdf

[2] https://github.com/OpenMDAO-Plugins/Hyperloop

[3] http://www.popsci.com/hyped-up-startups-race-hyperloop-life

bsdetector• 11 years ago

For those of us who aren't aeronautical engineers... if you just covered a normal expressway with a half tube, wouldn't the air start moving along with the vehicles and greatly decrease the drag at high speeds, making higher speeds more economical? Or at what point does the vacuum and ratio of vehicle to tube size make hyperloop work out, but a simple enclosed highway doesn't?

Swannie• 11 years ago

IANA engineer...

Only if the vehicles are self propelling from the ground, and if you refer back to trains really they are just pushing air in front of them, with some air escaping past them.

If there were not ventilation systems to allow the air behind the train to be filled, the train would need to work harder to essentially pull the air behind it.

At least, that's my understanding.

If the vehicles are not self propelling from the ground, and propel with air, like the original hyper-loop proposal, they are actually pushing air backwards to their direction of motion, which would stop any such forward moving air flow develop.

capkutay2• 11 years ago

Does anyone know about the relationship between SpaceX and Hyperloop Technologies? It looks like Hyperloop Tech has a lot of ex SpaceX engineers/execs, but they don't seem to have an active partnership with Musk or SpaceX

SapphireSun• 11 years ago

Hey Boston, want to join a feasibility meeting I'm setting up? Email me. :)

SpaceX Hyperloop Pod Competition

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